El Salvador floods: 500 missing after Hurricane Ida

The mayor of San Vicente has claimed that 500 people were missing on the
outskirts of his Salvadoran city following heavy flooding as a result of
Hurricane Ida.

7:00AM GMT 11 Nov 2009

"We have 500 missing people, more or less, according to the information people have given us, so that is not official but that is where the information we have gathered is, more or less," Mayor Medadro Hernandez Lara said.

Civil defense chief Jorge Melendez said the disaster at the local level was extreme but cautioned that "it is speculation we cannot confirm."

"There are entire families of seven and eight people who have been killed ... adding it up, the numbers are huge," insisted Hernandez Lara. "They have been buried in mudslides, by sand, rocks, mud ... Some are turning up in the Lempa River, others in the Acahuapa River (and) even out at sea as the current was so strong."

The civil defense official toll is 144 dead in the late-season flooding.

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San Vicente, 37 miles east of the capital and inland in the mountainous Central American nation, had a population of 53,213 in the 2007 census.

Rescue workers are still trying to reach dozens of towns cut off by torrents of mud and debris unleashed by the devastating late-season storms.

"The problem here in finding bodies is removing all these rocks and trees," Carlos Arce, 27, said.

Melendez warned that "the situation remains grave. We need to open up access routes into about 37 towns which at the moment are totally covered with tonnes of earth, rocks and trees."

The number of people seeking emergency shelter dropped slightly to 12,930, a civil protection official said, while 1,800 homes were damaged or destroyed and 18 bridges and many roads were washed away by the floods.